I live in a small condo complex in the middle of a pretty quiet neighborhood...

One night at 2am I was woken up by a dog barking the I hear a lot of voices. I look out the window and there is about 6 police cars all with their lights flashing. The dog was a very large German Shepard. The police officers were carrying rifles.

There was a car in the neighbors front yard smashed into a tree. All of a sudden the dog is on the scent and away everyone goes. About 5 min later they all come back to the cars with a young man in hand cuffs.

Everyone climbed in their cars and left.

A few weeks later I heard the rest of the story.

I was walking with my neighbor and pointed to the spot in the tree where the car crashed and she told me what she saw. Apparently the young man's grandmother lived above her and was banging on the door to the building and screaming for her to let him in when the cops found him.

So to recap this young man thought it would be a great idea to lead the cops on a high speed chase in a stolen car to his grandmother's house in a neighborhood with only one way in or out.

In my current neighborhood, it was last April during a tornado outbreak. I heard a big noise, and people shouting, so I went outside . There was a tornado within a couple of miles, and several of us watched it, felt the wind, and watched the green, bubbly clouds before it dawned on me that I should go inside. Someone was filming it . It was mesmerizing.

I've lived in my house 21 years so there have been several wild things happen.

Watching the across the street neighbor run around his front yard naked, high on cocaine, hiding behind bushes when cars came by and fighting with the friend trying to get him in the house.

Or maybe coming out of my shower in my favorite raggedy night shirt just in time for my neighbor's grown son to come crashing through my front door yelling for us to call the cops because his step dad just shot his mom.

Or several years later when a car pulls into driveway next door and 3 guys get out. We know neighbor (same one that shot his wife) wasn't home, so DH asked the guys if they needed some help. They mumbled something about checking on neighbor, then walked around to other side of the house and broke out a window. Cops got there as he was still crawling through. Later that same night, as we were finally winding down, we hear a shotgun blast. Get to the door to see a car flying out of same neighbor's drive. Turns out, he was home going to sleep and someone else tried to break in his house AGAIN!

With depressing frequency, car accidents. Usually because someone has pulled out of the parking lot of the convenience store into oncoming traffic.

The house next door has provided a couple. When a group of college-age kids occupied it, I heard a girl screaming for help, so I called the cops. According to a dispatcher I know, it was a good thing I called. She couldn't be any more specific than that, though.

With different tenants, there was a knife fight over a girl; we didn't witness that one, since we were out of town. The scariest had to be when their pit bulls dug under the fence into our yard and were behaving very aggressively. I thought both DH and I were going to get severely injured. We managed to get into the house and again called 911.

Logged

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~It's true. Money can't buy happiness. You have to turn it into books first. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

My neighborhood is GENERALLY quiet. I have one slightly less than sane woman who lives down the street, and, terrifyingly, has landed a job with the TSA. She's not exactly well-connected with reality all the time, so having her in charge of any kind of security is a bit nerve-wracking.

But the most strange, scary, and dramatic thing I've seen in my neighborhood?

It was bulk trash day. Neighbors across the street have put out their trash and an old tube-style TV is included amongst the trash, as are some other household odds and ends. A newish looking gray pickup truck rolls around the corner. A middle-aged man gets out, looking angry, and throws some of the household odds and ends into the back of the pickup, then takes out something long from the back - I wasn't really paying that much attention to the guy at this point.Suddenly...BOOM and the sound of shattering glass rang out. The guy throws the long thing - now obviously a shotgun or rifle of some sort - back in the back of the pickup and jumps in and drives off in a hurry. Yep, he shot the TV, in broad daylight. I was too stunned to think to even call the cops at that point.

1 - A naked man climbed onto my neighbours roof and wrestled their chimney. He then declared himself the winner and did a naked victory dance.

Sorry, I had to read that sentence a couple of times to make sure I understood it correctly.

My former neighbour was abusive towards his girlfriend. We'd call the cops whenever we heard her screaming. I can remember her accosting Mum on the street and telling her to mind her own business. Mum just shook her head and told her "Look after yourself, love". Later they moved. We don't know what became of them after that, but I do hope she left that b******

Logged

"Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this day-to-day living that wears you out". Chekhov.

We have lived in our home 26 years through floods, blizzards, and black bear sightings in the neighborhood. [We do live in a small village, though, not out in the forest.]

The most dramatic thing, however, was when a prisoner walked away from a work detail just outside the state prison about a mile up the road. The police acted as if Jack the Ripper were on the loose. Cop cars were all around the area, moving fast, sirens and lights on. They put up checkpoints all over, checked passengers in cars, and made everyone open their trunks for inspection. I got stopped several times just collecting my children from daycare. With all the care that law enforcement was taking I assumed that the missing man was a homicidal maniac.....or much worse! When we finally got home I checked the house, and kept all the windows and doors locked on a stifling day. Of course I didn't let my children out to play. We were all rather frightened.

After a short time I wondered why my husband hadn't come home early to protect us, because he worked in another branch of law enforcement. I called his office in Nearby City to ask why he wasn't coming home early to... save our lives. He told me not to worry, that the escapee was a *forger* of documents, not dangerous at all. What a surprise to me - I wasn't sure whether to believe him or not, but he was very reassuring.

Apparently the absconder was a white collar criminal who was frightened of some of the other prisoners. It was presumed that he skipped out so that he would be transferred to another prison away from the men who were threatening him. I guess that the local authorities were just bound and determined that he wouldn't get completely away.

Well, I still kept the kids in and the doors locked, but I did open the windows to let the breeze in. I think that the guy gave himself up to searchers by the time DH got home, and life was back to normal.

-Next door house caught on fire. I mean REALLY on fire. We were walking home from school, and Mom says "Is that smoke?" Half a block later: "That's really close." Another half block: "I think that's on our block." We get there, and not only is the house next door on fire, but our third floor was burning too! It got put out, but the third floor always smelle dof smoke thereafter, and I wasn't allowed up there. (Go on, ask me how I know it still smelled of smoke. )

Where I lived before we moved here:

-A family friend ODd in our bathroom. (Our house qualifies as the neighborhood, right?)

Where we live now:

-First year we lived here, our house was broken into. Funny thing is, we never found the point of entry, but our VCR was missing. And my shoes. Funnier: I didn't notice the shoes for a week. -This one we didn't see, but a house up the street a whole family committed suicide. (Well, the parents did, we're not sure the kids got a vote...) They duct taped plastic all over the windows and doors, turned on all the burners on the stove, and asphyxiated. To this day, no one knows why.-Another "we don't see it", but we hear gunshots somewhat frequently. Although they've gotten less frequent recently. Must be the economy and the cost of ammunition.

Guy stole a car from hospital that is 3 blocks away, robbed a store around the corner, then drove the car onto our street and set the engine on fire to distract from his getaway on foot. He had a gun and was not caught.

I have 2 scary stories, and until today, have never connected the disturbing similarities of execution and outcome.

#1. This happened approx 25 years ago. Fire and police sirens extremely loud and close to our home. Look out from the front door to see flames coming from a row of small shops just around the corner. One of the shop owners set fire to one of his competitorís shop. Sadly the family lived above the burning shop and one of the children perished. He was too large to escape thru the window.

#2. Not the same neighbourhood and more recent. Driving home I noticed police helicopters hovering close to where I live. Closer to home, at our local petrol station, was police, some with police dogs, fire engines, news vans and lots of onlookers. As I was driving I didnít see exactly was causing the ruckus and I consider that a good thing. A woman had been set alight. Her partner followed her to the garage and set fire to her and her car as she was filling it with petrol. The helicopters and dog squad were searching for the man only metres from my home. The woman died in hospital.

The craziest scariest thing that ever happened was when a house about three doors down across the street was busted for a meth lab. My dad was out of town and my mom and I were up late watching TV and spending time together, when we noticed lights on the walls. I looked outside and the entire county police force was on my street. Hazmat, unmarked, K9, regular, detective. Every thing. So my mom and my neighbors and everyone are all standing out gawking at it. Apparently they were actively cooking that night, and the neighbor thought it was someone breaking in, so they got snuck up on, and arrested. They also shower you in portable showers in the street, to get all the chemicals off. And the odd thing was we kept smelling something chemical and had really bad headaches the past few weeks before the bust. But we thought it was because they were repaving the road right next to wear we live. I am so thankful that it never blew up.

Then there was the shootout. A neighbor that found his wife in bed with another man, and proceeded to hold them hostage. My mom noticed the cops outside, and woke me up to sleep on the couch, because my room was right in the path if anyone decided to shoot.

Then there was my neighbor. She was mentally ill. I don't remember how, but she just didn't have all her faculties. She drove into my house. Thankfully nothing was broken, but there are skid marks on the pavement to this day. She thought she had the car in drive, but it was really in reverse. So she backed into my house. My family and I were all sitting together and then suddenly the whole house shook and there was a really loud sound. It freaked us all out.

Standing at the bus stop at the bottom of a hill watching a large semi with a flatbed trailer trying to make a right hand turn across the street from me after coming down the very steep hill. Chained to the flatbed was a huge bulldozer that must have weighed a few tons. This wasn't a safe hill to be traveling in a semi, it had an 11% grade and was barely a lane and a half wide.

So, the semi was traveling too fast and nearly jackknifed. The chains holding the bulldozer snapped and the bulldozer flies off the trailer, hits the street, does a somersault and keeps doing somersaults across the street right through the bus stop I had been standing at into the building behind it. Luckily, I had been watching the truck so when I saw the chains let loose I got out of the way.

Nothing to major, but unusual for where I lived. In 2007, when I was working at McDonalds, I was working front counter for a lunch shift one day. I looked out the doors/windows, and saw a man running into, and then across the parking lot. All of a sudden several police cars also turned into the parking lot. The way the restaurant was set up, you had to enter through 2 sets of doors to get into the restaurant, and there was a short walkway between the doors. The man ran through the first set of doors, and then the police grabbed him before he could come through the second set of doors.

We thought that the man had probably shoplifted from the mall across the street, and was planning on running through our restaurant to try to evade the police.

It was definitly surreal, given that things like that never happened where I used to live. I was so surprised at what I saw, my only reaction was to say out loud, "Well, that's interesting" as the whole thing was taking place.

There is a fairly major gas main nearby that the gas works were doing emergency repairs on a few years ago - closed the road and dug it up. They said they were replacing it before it became dangerous, so imagine our thoughts when we were woken in the middle of the night by a loud bang, and then a continous hissing sound.

The noise was loud enough that we had to raise voices to talk over it, even in a house some distance away. I looked up the emergency number for the gas while DH threw some clothes on and dashed outside to see what was going on. We're on a hill and you could see all the other house lights going on as everyone else did the same thing.

It turned out that a pneumatic cylinder had ruptured. Luckily there was a gas engineer living nearby who could fix it, but the potential combination of gas and explosion caused a lot of alarm.

When I lived in Wausau one night I heard a loud sound and the hosue shook. I went outside. Some idiots had run the car they were in right into the side of a house down the street. The amusing thing? The insurance adjuster walking around in his dressing gown assessing the damage.

Here in Tucson: I walked outside to go to work and there was a teenager in car. Trying to steal it. I shouted him out of the car but the damage had been done. Had to get my rear passenger window replaced as well as a new ignition.

About a mile from where I work- though I wasn't working at the time- is the Safeway where Rep. Giffords was shot.

The strip mall next to my apartment complex has a bank in it. It's been robbed 5 times in the last year.